Letter from Beijing.

Chinese Are Relishing Gourmet Fare

January 17, 1996|By In a land where cabbages once dominated the winter diet, the Tribune's Uli Schmetzer finds food is taking on a definite Italian accent and Uli Schmetzer is the Tribune's Far East and correspondent.

BEIJING — Ever since Gisa opened her Mozzarella Shop in Sanlitun and offered fresh Italian cheese "just like mama used to buy," life in China has taken a Great Leap Forward from the cabbage-eating days of previous winters.

It's not just the squishy ricotta, the cask-aged taleggio, the fresh asiago and stracchino, but the idea that at the end of daily traffic jams, the winter pollution from coal fires, the subzero cold and zero humidity there are Gisa's cheeses beckoning from refrigerated glass display cases.

Who cares if the mozzarella is a trifle dry, the taleggio a little overripe and the ricotta crumbles too easily? No, it's the joy of having Italian cheese during a Beijing winter where, until three years ago, the most prominent sight was mountains of cabbage heads piled in front of apartment blocks.

Cabbage was the one and only winter vegetable for decades. Delivered in trucks and dumped on pavements, it was doled out in portions by neighborhood committees, which allotted the lion's share to party loyals.

The cabbage was boiled, steamed, fried, broiled and brewed into potions. The odor of culinary preparation drifted from millions of kitchens, and the stale stench permeated alleys. Until the winter of '92, it was everywhere. Even tap water reeked of cabbage.

Now the odor is gone. Privatized winter markets offer cucumber, tomatoes, parsley, asparagus, leek, oranges, grapes, cherries--all imported from the warm south and Hainan Island through a distribution network that was taken out of Communist Party hands and passed into the profit-oriented care of entrepreneurs.

Chinese ladies no longer stroll in a cloud of superannuated cabbage stew but are enveloped in the alluring whiff of lavender, French perfumes and Eau d'Cologne. Italian aftershave lotion has become a must for men.

Gisa remembers the cabbage days well, when we all fled for the weekend to Hong Kong for a good meal, some fresh air, pounds of fresh fruit and a night out at a bar. We would return on the Monday flights carting suitcases jammed with veggies, wine, muesli, yogurt and diapers for the newlyweds.

Was that only a few years ago?

No need to fly to Hong Kong today when new supermarkets offer any item from around the globe, when there is live music at Minder's Cafe. Singles meet each weekend at Poacher's, Schiller's keeps 26 bottled German beer brands and Trader's Bar 27 foreign brews on huge copper taps.

There is jazz at the CD Pub, tete-a-tete at Cafe-Cafe, pop at the Brauhaus, deafening rock at the Hard Rock Cafe and a wide variety of international cuisines ranging from a Beijing version of "Fridays" to the Russian restaurant with a stuffed donkey on the doorstep and the dignified Indian eating house with the poetic moniker: Omar Khayyam.

The three-, four- and five-star hotels are racing to open French, Italian and Spanish eateries. To attract guests, some fly in gourmet dishes such as oysters from Scotland, prime beef from Texas and goose liver from France.

Gourmets can glut themselves on Swiss roestli and Zuricher geschnitzeltes at a mock tudor mansion called Zum Fass.

For those with more expensive tastes there are the Russian waitresses who light your cigarettes on one bent knee at Eden's, or Top Ten where customers keep their own bottles of Cognac; a plate of tropical fruits stands on the table.

It was a relatively short road from cabbage to Cognac days, but a bumpy one. Bars went bankrupt, discos were raided, pop concerts were canceled and Gisa's first food venture failed. She was determined that Sicilians can flourish anywhere, not just in the United States. And that Sicilians can survive any setback, even in China.

She began as a "foreign expert" lecturing in Italian at Beijing University before the lure of joint ventures and a newly affluent society wooed her off the campus and into the Trattoria, an Italian restaurant inside an alpine type of cottage where she cooked pasta and melanzana alla Siciliana--dishes her husband, a biologist, served to a clientele that often waited in line for a table.

Once the place was making money, Gisa's silent Chinese partner decided he wanted it all. She lost everything except her Sicilian spunk. That took her 30 miles out to the countryside at Nanshao city, where she converted a warehouse into a cheesemaking factory.

There is nothing miraculous about Gisa's cheese or China's boom. They both kind of happened in symbiosis. First came an imported cheesemaking machine, then arrived the foreign expert who had studied cheesemaking in Italy for a year. When everything was in place, the capital's hotels suddenly discovered an urgent demand for Italian cheeses and mozzarella that only Gisa could satisfy.

She is now the undisputed Mozzarella Queen. It's the kind of stuff legends are made of in modern China.